Crisis-driven digitalization and academic success across disciplines

While the rapid digitalization in higher education, accelerated by the COVID-19 pan- demic, has restructured the landscape of teaching and learning, a comprehensive under- standing of its implications on students’ academic outcomes across various academic disciplines remains unexplored. This study, therefore, aims to fill this gap by providing an in-depth examination of the effects of crisis-driven digitalization on student performance, specifically the shift to emergency remote education during the COVID-19 crisis. Lever- aging a panel dataset encompassing 82,694 individual student course grades over a span of six years, we explore the effects of digitalization across nationalities, educational levels, genders, and crucially, academic disciplines. Our findings are threefold: (i) firstly, we note that crisis-driven digitalization significantly impacted students’ chances of passing a course and achieving higher course grades in comparison to the pre-crisis period. (ii) Secondly, we found the effect to be heterogeneous across disciplines. Notably, practical disciplines, such as nursing, experienced a negative impact from this sudden shift, in contrast to more theoretical disciplines such as business administration or mathematics, which saw a positive effect. (iii) Lastly, our results highlight significant variations in the impact based on educational levels and nationalities. Master’s students had a harder time adapting to the digital shift than their bachelor counterparts, while international students faced greater challenges in less international academic environments. These insights underscore the need for strategic interventions tailored to maximize the potential of digital learning across all disciplines and student demographics. The study aims to guide educators and policymakers in creating robust digital learning environments that promote equitable outcomes and enhance students’ learning experiences in the digital age.


(i)
Comment: While I found the study interesting and the manuscript to be generally well-written, there were sections that I found confusing.There was significant overlap between the various sections and I frequently had to reorient myself to the headings provided.
Response: We are grateful for Reviewer 1's helpful comments regarding the organization of the manuscript.
Based on this feedback, we have restructured the paper to follow the suggested PLoS ONE format (1.Introduction,2. Materials and Methods,3. Results and Discussion,4. Conclusion), which should enhance its clarity and coherence.

(ii)
Comment: I also encourage you to think about some of the limitations of your study and include a section that addresses these limitations.
We are grateful for Reviewer 1's recommendation to further elaborate on the limitations inherent to our study.
In our initial submission, we discussed the aspect of selection bias and instructor fixed effects in section 4.1, the Empirical Strategy.This section also includes a detailed explanation of the robustness of our approach in circumventing these potential issues.
In response to your feedback, we have now added an explicit section focusing on the limitations of our study, where we acknowledge potential confounding factors that may have influenced the academic success of students during the pandemic, such as caregiving responsibilities, financial constraints, and limited access to the internet or other digital tools.We also emphasized the limited generalisability of our results and the issue of measurement error.Naturally, we also further developed our discussion on future research opportunities.This expanded section now incorporates and addresses the limitations we have identified, thereby paving the way for more comprehensive future investigations.This section aims to helps the reader understand the potential gaps in our design, and in the field.
*The following subsection was added in the manuscript text:*

Limitations and future research While our study offers valuable insights into the effects of crisis-driven digitalization on students' academic success across various disciplines and student characteristics, it comes with limitations.
The data sourced from a single Swedish university may limit the generalizability of our findings.It's important to consider that universities vary in their resources, student demographics, teaching practices, and digital infrastructures, all of which could impact the effects of digitalization on student success.Further, external factors such as caregiving responsibilities, financial burdens, or limited access to the internet or other digital technologies could have influenced students' academic success during the pandemic.Acknowledging these potential confounding factors is crucial.Future research should strive to broaden the applicability of these results, while maintaining depth of exploration, as previous studies often overview the general effects without considering individual academic disciplines.
Our study also uses measurable indicators of academic success, such as course pass rates and grades.However, there are many other important aspects of student learning and engagement that we did not examine, such as students' motivation, critical thinking skills, creativity, and overall well-being.Future research could explore these aspects and delve into how to better cater to the unique needs of each academic discipline during digital transitions.Lastly, we see the necessity for more extensive review studies that focus on heterogeneities across academic disciplines.These would help synthesize the existing literature and present a more comprehensive view of the impacts of crisis-induced digitalization.

(iii) Comment: Interesting that your findings suggest caring professionals (nursing, social work) had the largest negative effect on academic success. Might this be related to the unprecedented demands placed on these professions during the pandemic? I think a closer and more critical look at potential explanations for your findings is warranted.
Response: This is a valuable observation from Reviewer 1 and we agree that the increased demands on caring professionals during the pandemic could have had a significant impact on their academic success.We have now included this in the discussion section, offering potential explanations for this finding in the context of the pandemic's specific challenges.However, it is important to note that we lack data on the extent to which the students in our data experienced an increase in their labour supply during this period.

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The following text was added in the manuscript text (Results and discussion section): * "The negative effect on the academic success of health/social work students can be explained by the finding that wider performance gaps exist in fields that depend heavily on hands-on practice and instructor-student interactions [19].Many recent studies on the negative effect of digitalization due to the COVID-19 pandemic on students' academic success have attributed this finding to the fact that many medical and healthcare students around the world were prevented from participating in clinical rotations due to the risk of transmitting the virus as well as a lack of resources [45][46][47][48][49].This could explain why we found the largest negative effect on this school, particularly for nursing students.Teacher education is another discipline in which hands-on experience and the acquisition of practical skills are important, but as traditional educational practices are being reshaped, the switch to online education is viewed here as an opportunity rather than a challenge [59].